


A Late Night Double Feature Picture Show

by prophetic



Category: Bandom, My Chemical Romance, Rocky Horror Picture Show
Genre: Community: bandom_meme, Historical References, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-11-02
Updated: 2015-11-02
Packaged: 2018-04-29 12:59:44
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,689
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5128535
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/prophetic/pseuds/prophetic
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>New York City, 1948</p><p>Additional Warnings: period-typical homophobia, anonymous sex</p>
            </blockquote>





	A Late Night Double Feature Picture Show

1

Frank straightened the collar of his overcoat and paused at the closet door to pick out a hat. The dark-colored one. Wide brimmed. He didn’t wear it, as a rule, except on nights like tonight. He settled it low over his ears and gave it an extra tug for good measure. He walked the long way to the theater in the chilly, late autumn dark, avoiding the lit windows of any neighbor he’d ever spoken to on his street.

He found himself thinking about the cinema more when the seasons changed. It got cold early in a New York winter, and he coveted the smallest flash of warmth even more. The heat in his apartment was wildly unreliable. The radiators stood cold for hours, then sprang to life in a cacophony of hissing and clanking, usually while he was trying to sleep. He avoided taking it up with his landlady, because whenever they spoke, she mentioned how much she wanted him to meet her niece. “Such a lovely young woman,” she would tut. “Perfect for an eligible gentleman like yourself.”

It was another thing he liked about the theater. There were no nieces there. No eligible gentlemen. In the soft, soundproofed darkness of the late-night films were spacemen, mad scientists, women who turned into panthers, alien plant spores, intergalactic battles, and apemen. Sometimes, the films were in different languages, with wolfmen, vampires, twins enmeshed in sexual perversion, or strange and unnatural children who became monsters. It was hours in the darkness, submerged in an open world of possibility, depravity, and weirdness, hours of relief at not being the strangest creature in the room. The films themselves could have been enough reason to go.

At the ticket window, he handed his bills across the counter and received the stub, already torn, in return. No usher stood in the dim lobby outside the heavy theater door.

Frank made his way in the low lights and found a seat close to the aisle. Isolated figures were already scattered throughout the bank of folding seats. No one so much as glanced in his direction, and Frank kept his eyes down too. But he had been there often enough that he knew where he preferred to sit.

When the screen sprang to life and washed the room with light and shadow, Frank slid his hat back on his head, letting the reflected light from the screen wash over his face. The picture started, a space rocket from Mars crash landing in a field, discovered by an astronomer. The Martian pilot drew a laser gun on the astronomer, demanding the plans for the man’s own space-faring rocket prototype. A dark silhouette from the aisle fell across Frank’s view, and he turned.

The man’s face was in shadows, but Frank quickly took in his backlit shape. Slight. Narrow shoulders. An overcoat that was well-tailored.

The man extended his hand. Frank took it and stood. The man’s hand felt so warm in his. He let himself be led to the back row. There was a hallway of small rooms, Frank had heard, if you exited the theater by the side door. He had never been to the back rooms.

He sat in the back row, and the man sat beside him. They stared at the screen. Frank could smell the man’s coat, cigarette smoke and the musty scent of lanolin in the layers of damp wool. It wasn’t unpleasant. Not at all. He leaned, shifting himself slightly toward the smell.

He heard the man take a breath, but Frank kept his eyes on the screen, face expressionless. Figures in the theater stood and moved, strolling quietly, unhurriedly, to other seats to become pairs. On the screen, the Martian shot a man with his laser gun, and the man slumped to the ground, writhing in magnificent agony. The Martian clutched his laser and laughed triumphantly. Somewhere, a woman screamed, and Frank and the man fell into each other.

The man’s mouth on his, in a surprising, swooping sensation that made Frank’s joints weak. Despite the many times he had been to the theater, he had never, _never_ kissed another man before. Frank’s hand on the man’s wool coat, and then finding its way inside it, feeling the warmth he wanted to wrap himself in. The man reaching to touch Frank’s face and then to put his hands in Frank’s hair.

Frank’s hat toppled to the floor, between the seats.

Shedding coats, unbuckling belts, and behind them, fire and fumes as the prototype rocket braved Earth’s atmosphere and made its way into the uncharted emptiness of the solar system.

Frank felt himself grasping at things. The man’s thin, gentle fingers. The jut of his hips as his shirttails fell over Frank’s forearms. Clasping their bodies together, just to feel a moment more of the warmth of the man’s skin. He grasped at them even though he knew they would fall away from him, as surely as Earth fell away behind the rocket, leaving it adrift in void and nothingness, the frozen, subzero darkness of outer space.

They sat, and the movie was ending. The Martian was dead, the rocket was grounded on Earth, and the astronomer . . . there was something about a woman, something that tied up the story safely, everything returned to the routines and expectations of a normal life. A happy ending.

Next to him, the man shifted in his seat, buttoning his coat, making ready to rise. Frank stared doggedly at the man and the woman on the screen, refusing to turn, watching the shape of the man from the corner of his eye.

The man stood, but then ducked, picking something up from the ground. Frank’s hat. The man brushed it, pressing the creases gently into shape, his hand lingering for a moment. Then he held it out.

Frank took it. As he did, his fingers brushed the man’s. They were warm.

The man moved away, stepping out into the aisle. Frank sighed, settling into his seat, and waited for the second picture to start.

 

2

Gerard left before the second picture started. It was a double feature, but he had work in the morning. His new job, the first day. And still he had gone out, to the theater he saw on his first drive through the side streets of the new neighborhood. And when he saw it, he knew what he would find there, as surely as if it had been written on the marquee.

He shook his head, marveling at himself, as he walked in the chilly night air. His new job, his new neighborhood, a new city. But inside, he was realizing, he himself was just the same. _The first night!_ The first night after he found the theater, and he was there at the counter, buying a ticket. And inside the picture show, he had found the man.

Some men didn’t like to kiss, Gerard knew this. He would always watch carefully for the tiniest suggestion of reluctance as he let his face lean near a stranger’s. A handful of encounters cut painfully short, and one black eye and a broken nose—particularly memorable—had made him exquisitely sensitive to the smallest ways a man would start to stiffen or draw back.

But tonight, the man had turned toward him, first letting their faces touch, and then opening his mouth hungrily against Gerard’s, reaching his hands out toward him. The man’s nose and cheeks were still chilled from the night wind, but Gerard could feel a feverish warmth underneath. And then, finally, the warmth of his hand, when their fingers brushed as Gerard handed him the hat that had fallen to the ground.

He couldn’t think why he’d done it—why he’d paused, and then reached down to pick up the man’s hat. At best, he tried to ignore them when it was over. At worst, he left too hastily, occasionally leaving clothing items of his own when he wasn’t careful. Gerard shook his head again and quickened his pace, moving quickly along the night streets, returning to the new apartment that would be bare and dark.

 

3

At his office building in the morning, Frank hit the elevator call button. As he got on, someone else stepped into the car beside him. Frank glimpsed the man’s silhouette from the corner of his eye, and there was something. A wash of familiarity, and then a wave of fear. His dark wool coat, Frank could smell it, damp from the morning’s drizzle, the layered smells of lanolin and cigarettes. He turned to look at the man.

In the fluorescent light of the elevator car, the man’s skin was milky and pale, washed of color as though Frank was seeing him in the bright glare reflected from a movie screen. Fine features and large, deep set eyes.

The man looked at him. “Your hat,” he said.

His hat. The hat Frank hardly wore, except on nights like last night. The hat he had thoughtlessly put on this morning when he saw it was raining. Frank’s hand froze halfway to his head. He and the man stared at each other as the car continued to climb.

The man cleared his throat and looked away. They both stared at the blank elevator door. “Um. It’s a fine hat,” the man concluded. He cleared his throat again and asked, “Do you, ah. Do you enjoy the cinema?”

Frank’s throat was dry. “I—” His voice faltered, and everything sounded very far away. The lighted number ticked on for the next floor with a tiny chime, and the elevator ascended--climbing into the sky as though it was a rocket ship, the earth dwindling behind them. They stared at the door. Frank gathered himself. “Well, yes,” he said. He listened to his voice with surprise, as though it was someone else’s, as though it belonged to a character in a movie, and he was waiting for the plot to unfold. “On occasion I do.”

“Mmm.” The man was nodding, Frank saw from the corner of his eye. Frank straightened his hat. They rode the elevator in silence.

**Author's Note:**

> This story was written in response to the prompt "Late night double-feature picture show!" posted in [bandom_meme](http://bandom-meme.dreamwidth.org). It went all kinds of sideways after being originally conceived as fitting the "Rocky Horror fans AU" prompt title. I got to thinking about the world that, historically, B movies and pulpy sci-fi oddities used to hide, and how "sexual perversion" was sometimes an unspoken part of that, similar to how the tension between 'perversion' and a release from inhibitions plays an important role in The Rocky Horror Picture Show. 
> 
> I like to imagine that, after this story closes, Frank and Gerard somehow manage to work up the courage to speak to each other, or perhaps meet again at the movies, and go on to build a life together, something secret and sidelined but also wonderful and freeing, that--something that, like the B movie theater, can fit within the confines of their time.


End file.
